The disclosure relates, in general, to relay systems for providing voice captioning for hearing and vision impaired users and, more particularly, to a telephone system and method for providing braille captioning for hearing and vision impaired users.
Hereinafter, in the interest of simplifying this explanation, unless indicated otherwise, a sight impaired (e.g., blind or simply impaired) and hearing impaired (e.g., deaf or only partially impaired) person (e.g., a deafblind person) using a communication system will be referred to as an “assisted user” and another person communicating with the assisted user that is not impaired will be referred to as a “hearing user”. In addition, a communication device that can be used by a hearing impaired person to communicate with a hering user whereby the communication device broadcasts the hearing user's voice signals and also can present text corresponding to the hearing user's voice via a display screen will be referred to as a “captioned device”. Moreover, a system that can convert a hearing user's voice signal to text will be referred to as a “relay” and a person at the relay that converts the hearing user's voice signal to text will be referred to as a “call assistant”.
Captioned devices have similarities to standard telephones and may further include a display that outputs a text-based transcript of words a hearing user voices throughout a conversation with a hearing impaired person. A hearing impaired person using a captioned device may listen to a hearing user's voice signals as broadcast by a captioned device and also read text captions presented on a captioned device display. Examples of captioned devices and relay systems used therewith are described in U.S. patent application publication No. 2013/0308763 and U.S. Pat. Nos. 8,515,024, 5,909,482 and 6,603,835, each of which is incorporated herein in its entirety by reference.
In some cases a captioned device is designed to work on an analog public switched telephone network (PSTN), often called plain old telephone service (POTS), while other captioned devices may be designed to use a broadband internet connection or other type of communication connection to provide captioning. Systems that use the Internet are referred to as Internet Protocol (IP) captioned devices.
While captioned devices and associated relay systems that convert a hearing user's voice signal to text have been adopted broadly within the deaf community and are widely accepted and enjoyed among persons that have at least some hearing loss, unfortunately, these devices or similar devices have not been developed to help persons that are both hearing impaired as well as blind or at least sight impaired (e.g., deafblind persons referred to hereinafter as “assisted users”). There currently is a need for a communication system that enables assisted users to communicate with hearing and other persons in a manner that is more similar to the way in which two hearing persons can communicate using telephones or similar devices.